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Abstract RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) are a class of proteins that primarily function by interacting with different types of RNAs and play a critical role in regulating the transcription and translation of cancer-related genes. However, their role in the progression of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) remains unclear. In this study, we analyzed RNA sequencing data and the corresponding clinical information of patients with HCC to screen for prognostic RBPs. Insulin-like growth factor 2 mRNA-binding protein 3 (IGF2BP3) was identified as an independent prognostic factor for liver cancer. It is upregulated in HCC and is associated with a poor prognosis. Elevated IGF2BP3 expression was validated via immunohistochemical analysis using a tissue microarray of patients with HCC. IGF2BP3 knockdown inhibited the proliferation of Hep3B and HepG2 cells, whereas IGF2BP3 overexpression promoted the expansion of HuH-7 and MHCC97H cells. Mechanistically, IGF2BP3 modulates cell proliferation by regulating E2F1 expression. DNA hypomethylation of the IGF2BP3 gene may increase the expression of IGF2BP3, thereby enhancing cell proliferation in HCC. Therefore, IGF2BP3 may act as a novel prognostic biomarker and a potential therapeutic target for HCC.

Due to spectacular gains during periods of rapid price increase and unpredictably large drops, Bitcoin has become a popular emergent asset class over the past few years. In this paper, we are interested in predicting the crashes of Bitcoin market. To tackle this task, we propose a framework for deep learning time series classification based on contrastive learning. The proposed framework is evaluated against six machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) baseline models, and outperforms them by 15.8% in balanced accuracy. Thus, we conclude that the contrastive learning strategy significantly enhance the model’s ability of extracting informative representations, and our proposed framework performs well in predicting Bitcoin crashes.

As global population ageing accelerates, cancer emerges as a predominant cause of mortality. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) play crucial roles in cancer cell growth and death, given their involvement in regulating downstream gene expression levels and numerous cellular processes. Cell death, especially non-apoptotic regulated cell death (RCD), such as ferroptosis, pyroptosis and necroptosis, significantly impacts cancer proliferation, invasion and metastasis. Understanding the interplay between lncRNAs and the diverse forms of cell death in cancer is imperative. Modulating lncRNA expression can regulate cancer onset and progression, offering promising therapeutic avenues. This review discusses the mechanisms by which lncRNAs modulate non-apoptotic RCDs in cancer, highlighting their potential as biomarkers for various cancer types. Elucidating the role of lncRNAs in cell death pathways provides valuable insights for personalised cancer interventions.

Abstract Background Massive neurocysticercosis is a rare form of neurocysticercosis, and can lead to serious conditions and even death. Case presentation Here we present a case of ten-year-old Tibetan girl who developed headache and vomiting. Her brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) illustrated lots of intracranial cystic lesions, and no obvious extracranial lesions were found. Serum immunoglobulin G antibodies against cysticerci were positive by the use of an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). These results in combination with her medical history were in line with massive neurocysticercosis. The patients recovered well after supportive management and antiparasitic treatment. Conclusions This case provides insights on the diagnosis and treatment of massive neurocysticercosis. The treatment of patients with massive neurocysticercosis should be in an individualized fashion, and the use of antiparasitic drugs in these patients must be decided after carefully weighing the risks and benefits.

ObjectiveTo analyze the clinical epidemiological characteristics including clinical features, disease prognosis of pneumococcal meningitis (PM), and drug sensitivity of S. pneumoniae isolates in Chinese children.MethodsA retrospective analysis was performed on the clinical, laboratory microbiological data of 160 hospitalized children less than 15 years of age with PM from January 2019 to December 2020 in 33 tertiary hospitals in China.ResultsA total of 160 PM patients were diagnosed, including 103 males and 57 females The onset age was 15 days to 15 years old, and the median age was 1 year and 3 months. There were 137 cases (85.6%) in the 3 months to

BackgroundChina has long been with high Hepatitis B Virus(HBV) prevalence in the world. The HBV prevalence of people aged 1–59 decreased to less than 8% in 2006, and by 2020, HBsAg positive rate of children aged

In order to improve the efficiency, quality, and utilization rate of raw ingredients for Hunan flavor marinated beef, bovine leg meat was used as raw material and traditional marinated (atmospheric pressure, 95 ℃) was used as control, The NaCl mass transfer coefficients, sensory quality, texture characteristics and microstructure of beef under different vacuum marinated, micropressure marinated, pulse marinated conditions were studied to optimize the best marinated process. The results showed that the optimal marinated process was pulse marinated process: −50 kPa, 80 ℃ combined with +50 kPa, 95 ℃, pulse frequency 4 times, and marinated duration 2.7 h, Under these conditions, the sensory score (89.6) and NaCl mass transfer coefficients value (2.71×10−6 m2/s) of beef were obtained. They were superior to the optimal conditions of vacuum marinated (-50 kPa, 80 ℃), the optimal conditions of micropressure marinated (+50 kPa, 95 ℃), sensory scores of traditional marinated (85.2, 86.1, 83.6), and the NaCl mass transfer coefficients (1.91×10−6、1.92×10−6、1.64×10−6 m2/s). The texture characteristics of pulse marinated beef were significantly improved (P

Enhancing photocarrier separation is a key step of photocatalysis, and in situ constructed composition interface is an advanced method to achieve this aim. Therefore, we report a face-to-face Bi2WO6/BiOCl (BWOC) which was synthesized via the continuous in situ ion-exchange method. As UV light is harmful to the human body, BWOC exhibits excellent photocatalytic activity only in visible light, and this is an important feature because visible light is a human-friendly operating condition. Under 50 W visible LED lamp illumination, unexcited BiOCl (BOC) only extracts electrons of excited Bi2WO6 (BWO), and holes remain on BWO, resulting in excellent photocarrier spatial separation efficiency through the face-to-face interface. This is why BWOC can be safe to use for the removal of hazardous substances. Compared with BWO and BOC, BWOC possesses 2.6 and 5.6 times higher photodegradation activity than RhB. This work provides a novel insight of efficient visible light photocatalytic system for environmental remediation.

IntroductionHepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) has very poor prognosis due to its immunosuppressive properties. An effective measure to regulate tumor immunity is brachytherapy, which uses 125I seeds planted into tumor. T cell immune receptors with immunoglobulin and ITIM domains (TIGIT) is highly expressed in HCC. The TIGIT-targeted probe is expected to be an effective tool for indicating immunomodulation of 125I seed brachytherapy in HCC. In this study, We constructed a novel peptide targeting TIGIT to evaluate the immune regulation of 125I seed brachytherapy for HCC by near-infrared fluorescence (NIRF).MethodsExpression of TIGIT by immunofluorescence (IF) and flow cytometry (FCM) in different part and different differentiated human liver cancer tissues was verified. An optical fluorescence probe (Po-12) containing a NIRF dye and TIGIT peptide was synthesized for evaluating the modulatory effect of 125I seed brachytherapy. Lymphocytes uptake by Po-12 were detected by FCM and confocal microscopy. The distribution and accumulation of Po-12 in vivo were explored by NIRF imaging in subcutaneous and orthotopic tumors. IHC and IF staining were used to verify the expression of TIGIT in the tumors.ResultsTIGIT was highly expressed in HCC and increased with tumor differentiation. The dye-labeled peptide (Po-12) retained a stable binding affinity for the TIGIT protein in vitro. Accumulation of fluorescence intensity (FI) increased with time extended in subcutaneous H22 tumors, and the optimal point is 1 h. TIGIT was highly expressed on lymphocytes infiltrated in tumors and could be suppressed by 125I seed brachytherapy. Accumulation of Po-12-Cy5 was increased in tumor-bearing groups while declined in 125I radiation group.

Abstract. Background:. Psoriasis is a common, chronic, immune-mediated inflammatory skin disease with increased epidermal proliferation. The objective of this review was to systematically identify the evidence and perform a network meta-analysis (NMA) to estimate the relative efficacy of secukinumab (SEC) against adalimumab (ADA) and infliximab (INF) for the treatment of moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis. Methods:. A systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted according to a pre-specified protocol to identify relevant studies. Initially, the databases were searched from database inception till June 2013, and the SLR was updated in April 2020. The eligibility criteria included adult patients (≥18 years old) with moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis, and the SLR included randomized controlled trials (RCTs). The comparators of interest were SEC, ADA, INF, and placebo (PLA), while outcomes of interest were Psoriasis Area and Severity Index (PASI) (50, 75, and 90) at weeks 12, 16, and 24. A Bayesian NMA for PASI was utilized with a framework that evaluated the probability of PASI responses in different categories of PASI thresholds within a single model. Results:. A total of 23 RCTs that assessed the efficacy of SEC, ADA, and INF in patients with moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis were identified. At 12 weeks, SEC was associated with a significantly better response compared with PLA and ADA for PASI 75 and 90, while response results were comparable against INF. At 12 weeks, risk ratio (95% confidence interval) derived from NMA for SEC vs. ADA and INF for PASI 75 was 1.35 (1.19, 1.57) and 1.01 (0.90, 1.18), respectively. At the 16-week and 24-week time interval, SEC was significantly better than PLA, ADA, and INF for PASI 75 and 90. Conclusion:. Efficacy of SEC in the treatment of patient populations with moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis is well demonstrated through NMA.

In this study, the Log-Periodic Power Law Singularity (LPPLS) model is adopted for real-time identification and monitoring of Bitcoin bubbles and crashes using different time scale data, and the modified Lagrange regularization method is proposed to alleviate the impact of potential LPPLS model over-fitting to better estimate bubble start time and market regime change. The goal here is to determine the nature of the bubbles and crashes (i.e., whether they are endogenous due to their own price evolution or exogenous due to external market and/or policy influences). A systematic market event analysis is performed and correlated to the Bitcoin bubbles detected. Based on the daily LPPLS confidence indictor from 1 December 2019 to 24 June 2021, this analysis has disclosed that the Bitcoin boom from November 2020 to mid-January 2021 is an endogenous bubble, stemming from the self-reinforcement of cooperative herding and imitative behaviors of market players, while the price spike from mid-January 2021 to mid-April 2021 is likely an exogenous bubble driven by extrinsic events including a series of large-scale acquisitions and adoptions by well-known institutions such as Visa and Tesla. Finally, the utilities of multi-resolution LPPLS analysis in revealing both short-term changes and long-term states have also been demonstrated in this study.

The question of why entrepreneurs undertake business planning activities differently, ranging from planning “in the head” to generating formal written documents, is still impenetrable. Aggregating data on 11,064 observations from 32 independent data set, this study meta-analyzed how business experience and gender influence entrepreneurs' disposition to business planning behaviors. Surprisingly, contradictory to some extant views that entrepreneurs without prior experience are more likely to make business plans, we found that both managerial experience and entrepreneurial experience positively influence entrepreneurs' subsequent business planning behaviors. Drawing insight from the effectuation and institutional perspectives, this study showed that, rather than entrepreneurial experience, managerial experience motivates entrepreneurs to generate formal business plans. For entrepreneurs who create formal business plans, both entrepreneurial experience and managerial experience enhance their business planning sophistication. In addition, we examined the moderating effects of gender on the relationship between business experience and business planning. The results suggested that female entrepreneurs with entrepreneurial experience are more likely to undertake business planning behaviors and create formal business plans than their male counterparts.

Objective A meta-analysis to investigate the risk factors for postoperative hypocalcaemia after thyroidectomy in adult patients. Methods A systematic search of publications in the electronic databases (PubMed®, The Cochrane Library, Web of Science, OVID and Embase®) from inception to June 2020 was conducted. Screening of titles, abstracts and full texts and data extraction were independently performed by two authors. The OR was selected as the pooled estimate. Results The analysis included 23 studies. Twelve significant risk factors for postoperative hypocalcaemia were identified: hypoparathyroidism, OR 5.58; total thyroidectomy, OR 3.59; hypomagnesaemia, OR 2.85; preoperative vitamin D deficiency, OR 2.32; female sex, OR 1.49; thyroid malignancy, OR 1.85; thyroiditis, OR 1.48; substernal multinodular goitres, OR 1.70; parathyroidectomy, OR 1.58; central compartment neck dissection, OR 1.17; modified radical neck dissection, OR 1.57; and central neck dissection, OR 1.54. Conclusions This meta-analysis provides moderate-to-high quality evidence that the 12 risk factors were predictive of postoperative hypocalcaemia, which should be monitored closely before thyroidectomy.

ObjectiveOur previous clinical study showed that low lung levels of CC16 strongly influence the occurrence and development of ARDS. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the therapeutic effect of rCC16 on LPS-induced inflammation in A549 cells and to determine its mechanism.MethodsCell apoptosis and inflammation was induced by LPS stimulation. The cytotoxic effect of rCC16 was evaluated using the MTT assay. Cytokine levels were determined using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays. The molecular mechanism of rCC16 was investigated by analyzing relevant signaling pathways.ResultsThe LPS treatment of A549 cells significantly decreased cell viability, increased the levels of the apoptotic proteins Bax, Bak and Cleaved Caspase-3, the secretion of inflammatory cytokines, and the expression levels of TLR4, p-NF/κB, MAPK proteins. While the levels of Bcl-2, p-AKT, p-mTOR, p-ERK1/2, NF/κB, p-AMPK, and p-p38 were significantly decreased in LPS-treated A549 cells. Our experimental results also confirmed that rCC16 inhibited LPS-induced apoptosis, promoted A549 cell proliferation by activating the PI3K/AKT/mTOR/ERK1/2 pathway, and inhibited the release of certain inflammatory factors, especially HMGB1, through dephosphorylation and inactivation of the TLR4/NF-κB/AMPK signaling pathways.ConclusionThese results highlight the potential utility of CC16 as an important cytokine for the prevention or treatment of inflammation and show that CC16 may play an important role in the future clinical treatment of ARDS.

AIM: To assess the efficacy and safety of orthokeratology for reducing the progression of myopia in Asia children. METHODS: Seven databases, including the Cochrane Library, Medline, EMbase, CBM, CNKI, VIP, and WanFang Data, were searched. The published languages were limited to English and Chinese. The risk bias tool provided by Cochrance cooperation and methodological index for non-randomized studies(MINORS)scale were used to assess the risk bias of included studies(randomized controlled trials and controlled trials). The published biases of included studies were assessed with funnel plot. Meta-analysis was performed with Review Manager 5.3. RESULTS: Seven eligible studies, including 478 children, were included, 250 cases in ortho-k group, 228 cases in control group. The Meta-analysis indicated that change in axial length of ortho-k group was significantly less than the control group \〖WMD=-0.31, 95%CI(-0.35, -0.26), PCONCLUSION: The overall findings suggested that orthokeratology might slow the progression of myopia in children of Asia.

There is a growing trend recently in big data analysis that focuses on behavior interiors, which concern the semantic meanings (e.g., sentiment, controversy, and other state-dependent factors) in explaining the human behaviors from psychology, sociology, cognitive science, and so on, rather than the data per se as in the case of exterior dimensions. It is more intuitive and much easier to understand human behaviors with less redundancy in concept by exploring the behavior interior dimensions, compared with directly using behavior exteriors. However, they usually approach from a unidimensional perspective with a lack of a sense of interrelatedness. Thus, integrating multiple behavior dimensions together into some numerical measures to form a more comprehensive view for subsequent prediction processes becomes a pivotal issue. Moreover, these studies usually focus on the magnitude but neglect the associated temporal features. In this paper, we propose a behavior interior dimension-based neighborhood collaborative filtering method for the top-N hashtag adoption frequency prediction that takes into account the interdependence in temporal dynamics. Our proposed approach couples the similarity in user preference and their impact propagation, by integrating the linear threshold model and the enhanced CF model based on behavior interiors. Experiments on Twitter demonstrate that the behavior-interior-aware CF models achieve better adoption prediction results than the state-of-the-art methods, and the joint consideration of similarity in user preference and their impact propagation results in a significant improvement than treating them separately.

Bordetella pertussis is an important human respiratory pathogen. Here, we describe a loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) method for the rapid detection of B. pertussis in clinical samples based on a visual test. The LAMP assay detected the BP485 target sequence within 60 min with a detection limit of 1.3 pg/µl, a 10-fold increase in sensitivity compared with conventional PCR. All 31 non-pertussis respiratory pathogens tested were negative for LAMP detection, indicating the high specificity of the primers for B. pertussis. To evaluate the application of the LAMP assay to clinical diagnosis, of 105 sputum and nasopharyngeal samples collected from the patients with suspected respiratory infections in China, a total of 12 Bordetella pertussis isolates were identified from 33 positive samples detected by LAMP-based surveillance targeting BP485. Strikingly, a 4.5 months old baby and her mother were found to be infected with B. pertussis at the same time. All isolates belonged to different B. pertussis multilocus sequence typing (MLST) groups with different alleles of the virulence-related genes including 4 alleles of ptxA, 6 of prn, 4 of tcfA, 2 of fim2 and 3 of fim3. The diversity of B. pertussis carrying toxin genes in clinical strains indicates a rapid and continuing evolution of B. pertussis. This combined with its high prevalence will make it difficult to control. In conclusion, we have developed a visual detection LAMP assay, which could be a useful tool for rapid B. pertussis detection, especially in situations where resources are poor and in point-of-care tests.

An important question in social neuroscience is the similarities and differences in the neural representations between the self and close others. Most studies examining this topic have identified the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) region as the primary area involved in this process. However, several studies have reported conflicting data, making further investigation of this topic very important. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we investigated the brain activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) when Chinese participants passively listened to their self-name (SN), their mother's name (MN), and unknown names (UN). The results showed that compared with UN recognition, SN perception was associated with a robust activation in a widely distributed bilateral network, including the cortical midline structure (the MPFC and ACC), the inferior frontal gyrus, and the middle temporal gyrus. The SN invoked the bilateral superior temporal gyrus in contrast to the MN; the MN recognition provoked a stronger activation in the central and posterior brain regions in contrast to the SN recognition. The SN and MN caused an activation of overlapping areas, namely, the ACC, MPFC, and superior frontal gyrus. These results suggest that Chinese individuals utilize certain common brain region in processing both the SN and the MN. The present findings provide evidence for the neural basis of the self and close others for Chinese individuals.

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of our study is to investigate whether diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is useful for monitoring the therapeutic response after neoadjuvant chemotherapy in osteosarcoma of long bones. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and DWI were obtained from 35 patients with histologically proven osteosarcomas. MR examinations were performed in all patients before and after 4 courses of preoperative neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Apparent diffusion coefficients (ADC) were measured. The degree of tumor necrosis was assessed macroscopically and histologically by two experienced pathologists after operation. Student's t test was performed for testing changes in ADC value. Pearson's correlation coefficient was used to estimate the correlation between necrosis rate and post- neoadjuvant chemotherapy ADC values. P

Distributed data storage is a key technology in the data collection in wireless sensor networks. The storage scheme based on network coding is applied to data collection in wireless sensor networks because of its high reliability and low overhead. However, it is an open problem to reduce data repair communication overhead caused by the failure of storage nodes. This paper focuses on this issue and presents a two-layer distributed data storage scheme. The lower-layer nodes store the encoded data blocks and the upper-layer nodes store the re-encoded blocks that are responsible for failure data recovery. Based on the two-layer data storage scheme, a data repair method is proposed to decrease the repair communication overhead with only sacrificing lower storage overhead. Compared with MSR, interference alignment-based scheme and group interference alignment scheme, the proposed method has lower repair communication overhead. We prove that the proposed method can reduce the repair communication overhead to o ( 1 / k ) times and it is suitable to resource-constrained distributed wireless sensor networks.

Staphylococcus aureus is commonly carried asymptomatically in the human anterior nares and occasionally enters the bloodstream to cause invasive disease. Much of the global diversity of S. aureus remains uncharacterised, and is not clear how disease propensity varies between strains, and between host populations.We compared 147 isolates recovered from five kindergartens in Chengdu, China, with 51 isolates contemporaneously recovered from cases of pediatric infection from the main hospital serving this community. The samples were characterised by MLST, the presence/absence of PVL, and antibiotic resistance profiling.Genotype frequencies within individual kindergartens differ, but the sample recovered from cases of disease shows a general enrichment of certain MLST genotypes and PVL positive isolates. Genotypes under-represented in the disease sample tend to correspond to a single sequence cluster, and this cluster is more common in China than in other parts of the world.Virulence propensity likely reflects a synergy between variation in the core genome (MLST) and accessory genome (PVL). By combining evidence form biogeography and virulence we demonstrate the existence of a "native" clade in West China which has lowered virulence, possibility due to acquired host immunity.